After an experience of the modern roadside inn, or of the “reserved lounges” of the alcohol-palaces of to-day, what can be more delightful reading than the description of the interior of the “Maypole,” in _Barnaby Rudge_? “The very snuggest, cosiest, and completest bar that ever the wit of man devised. Such amazing bottles in old oaken pigeon-holes; such gleaming tankards hanging from pegs at about the same inclination as thirsty men would hold them to their lips; such sturdy little Dutch kegs ranged in rows on shelves; so many lemons hanging in separate nets, suggestive, with goodly loaves of sugar stowed away hard by, of punch, idealized beyond all mortal knowledge, etc. etc.” Hardly an ideal landlord of the past, though, was old John Willet. A far better stamp of host was Gabriel Varden, the locksmith, who took deep draughts of sparkling home-brewed ale, from a goodly jug of well-browned clay, for breakfast, and who was one of the “Maypole’s” best customers. Mr. Chester—whose interview with his son will remind the student of Monsieur le Marquis’s interview with his nephew, in _A Tale of Two Cities_—was a judge of wine, though not given to over-indulgence in the bowl, like his bastard, Maypole Hugh; and Lord George {218} Gordon’s favourite brew appears to have been hot mulled wine. As for the rest of the rioters, they drank, after the manner of rioters, anything they could get. The first mention of wine in _A Tale of Two Cities_ is the fall and breakage, _pro bono publico_, of a large cask of inferior claret in the district of St. Antoine—emblematic of the blood to be spilt in Paris later on—which called forth the delightful, philosophic remark of Defarge, the master of the wine-shop to which the cask had been consigned: “It is not my affair. The people from the market did it. Let them bring another.” But the chief imbibers in the book are Sydney Carton and Serjeant Stryver, the pushing and successful advocate for whom the other “devilled.” Stryver, we gather from Edmund Yates’s _Reminiscences_, was modelled by Dickens, from Mr. Edwin James, Q.C., who at one time “stood high in popular favour,” and who “liked talking.” There is plenty of subsequent moderate drinking—in Defarge’s wine-shop principally—but with the exception of these two advocates, Stryver and Carton—“what the two drank together, between Hilary Term and Michaelmas might have floated a king’s ship”—nobody appears to swallow an undue amount of alcohol, in this the most powerful, and the saddest, of all Dickens’s books.